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Iceman Falleth
Location: Ouray, Colorado Date: February 5, 1992 Story On the morning of February 5, 1992, three members of the Los Alamos Mountaineering Club set out to scale the ice covered walls of a canyon just outside Ouray, Colorado. This was the first time they had ever gone ice climbing, and they decided on several areas that looked like prime candidates for doing so, and the first and easiest in their minds was Box Canyon, a spectacular area that is tough to get out of with heights varying form 50 or 60 feet to 170 feet. Jan Studebaker had 12 years climbing experience. Chris Brizlog, also an experienced climber, was new to the club. 50-year-old John Meyer was an experienced rock climber, but he had only been ice climbing once. He had a fearless attitude and was always ready, but that had gotten him into a number of problems in the past. The men found a spot that looked like it may be a good place to do their ice climbing but they weren't certain because they couldn't see the bottom. The only way to do it would be to throw the rope in the air, let it drape over the cliff, and then repel down on it. A typical rope is 165 feet long, and a doubled one gave slightly over 80 feet to repel on, which they thought would get them to the bottom. The cliffs went straight down into the river. Jan was the first to go down, repelling and keeping track of the end of the rope, and then he realized it was too short to get them to the bottom, so he got his tools down and climbed to the bottom. Chris fixed the rope so that they had one long strand going down all the way to the bottom, so he grabbed what looked like the short end and piled it in the snow at the end of the cliff. Jan was sorting his gear, not paying much attention to what was happening, when John began to repel down. The rope happened to be too short again, so he slipped off and fell 50 feet down the face of the cliff and hit the ground. Seeing that John had fallen, Chris ran to call for help. Craig O'Connell, an off-duty paramedic, happened to be climbing nearby, knowing John had fallen a good distance and was wondering if he was still alive. When Craig assessed him, he seemed unresponsive and was gurgling so Jan was very concerned, knowing his lungs were in trouble and thought his friend was dying in front of him. The Ouray Mountain Volunteer Rescue Team was dispatched to Box Canyon. Among the responders was Bill Whitt. They had often trained on the ice, but until this time, they had never had to rescue anyone from there. Craig was not hearing any noises from John, so he opened his airway with a jaw thrust, and after that he began breathing on his own. He was a bit combative, which made Craig think about the possibility of a head injury. Underneath his right armpit were some air bubbles, which made it obvious that he had punctured a lung. Nearly an hour after John's fall, the first rescue workers arrived on the scene, including EMT Bill Dwelling. He was still in bad shape and feeling a lot of pain to breathe. The more he regained consciousness the more pain he felt. The only way to get John out was to hoist him back up the frozen waterfall. The rescuers had to be very careful when doing so, since they didn't want to have another patient. EMT Randy Gurkey was carefully lowered down on a pulley system with the stokes basket, and when he saw where John had fallen from he was surprised he was doing as well as he was. John's breathing sounds had decreased on one side, and that could have been rapidly fatal, since a lung could collapse from air in the chest. Usually the patient is put in a horizontal position and two people tend to him or her on the way up, but in this case they wanted to save weight and gain speed. Knocking snow and ice from the top made it difficult, since some ice chunks weighed several pounds. It was a dangerous rescue, especially balancing safety and weight, and the rescuers wanting John to have a chance made them work faster. The ice buildup on the pipe made it very difficult to stabilize him on top of it, and it was a 200-foot drop to the bottom of the canyon, so they needed to make sure it was safe enough for all of them to move simultaneously. Despite the fact that the accident only occurred a few hundred yards from the road, it took five hours to get John to the waiting ambulance. It made Chris realize just how serious an accident in the high mountains is. John was treated for hypothermia, a collapsed lung, six broken ribs, and released after a week in the hospital. Jan said it was an absolute miracle that John did not die from that accident, since most people probably would have, and if they hadn't come together to help him so quickly it could have easily been a different story. Chris was impressed by the communication by the rescuers, always careful and doing the things the climbers had not been doing when they set up the repel. The basic lesson John learned was that everyone makes mistakes, and he had no plans to go ice climbing again after the accident. Dwelling's advice to anyone is to find proper training, because if you go out without much knowledge or equipment, you could easily get yourself into big trouble and need to be rescued. John said he couldn't express enough of his great gratitude to his rescuers. Category:1992 Category:Colorado Category:Falls Category:Hypothermia